Yes, we all were, at the time. There was, to begin with, a fierce battle
against the communists at the time.

This communist point--tell us about that.

Yes, when the Youth League was founded it was very nationalistic. African
nationalism was the slogan of the Youth League, and it was very anti-foreign
ideologies--as they were called. That included, of course, the Communist and
the Young Communist League. There was fierce competition for the allegiance of
the youth, between the Youth League and the communists. But it was ambivalent,
because on the one hand, the mother body, the ANC itself welcomed anybody,
including the communists, in its ranks. But you had this undercurrent of Youth
League demanding that the ANC should put forward an African nationalistic
policy which is anti-communist.

The Youth League even tried to get a resolution through at the ANC national
conference in 1946, which would have the effect of removing communists from the
ANC. The resolution was heavily defeated by conservative politicians ...
Mandela was in the forefront of the anti-communist groupings, although he was
at Wits [University] and a lot of the young communists were at Wits Even many
of his friends were members of the communist party. People like Ismail Meer,
J.N. Singh ... But on the political platforms he was well known as one of the
people opposing the influence of communists in the ANC.

Do you have any recollection of the sort of things that he used to say from
political platforms about communists?

I can't really be specific. It was the general sort of Youth League propaganda
against foreign ideologies, against people trying to hijack the struggle of the
African people. That Africans must stand up for themselves and that the
strategies and tactics of the struggle should be determined by the African
people themselves, and not by others. These were the sort of things that would
be said in all the meetings. It was not easy because you had prominent
communists who were in the ANC. J.B. Marks, and Moses Kotane and others who
were leaders of the Communist Party and were on the executive of the ANC. So
this was frequently a source of a lot of friction ... and the Youth Leaguers
were regarded as a very big nuisance because of their attitude.

This African nationalism also included a certain hostility towards Indian
people in the struggle, like Yusuf Cachalia and so forth, who later became his
friends ...

Well, you see, at Wits he had Indian friends ... but they were communists ...
that's why I say there's a great deal of ambivalence in the whole attitude of
the Youth League, because here they were forced to work with people and yet
they were going around, especially among Africans, condemning any relationship
with Indians or whites, which had the effect of depriving the Africans of their
own control over strategy and tactics and so on. This was the whole idea, that
we had to be independent in the formulation of policy and not be influenced by
others. Yet, practical campaigns demanded that in the fight against white rule
and segregation and so on, you had to work with others, and that did ,in fact,
happen. But the Youth League would say that cooperation is okay provided that
the Africans have got their own independent body, the ANC, to which others were
excluded. The ANC, at the time, excluded non-Africans from their membership.

Did you observe the transformation in Mandela? He evolved and matured--did
you witness anything in Mandela?

I think that the transformation of the Youth League from an exclusive African
nationalist organization into one with a broader outlook, affected all of us,
not just Mandela personally. The Youth League was confronted by this problem as
a result of practical struggles that had to be waged against white rule.
Remember that in the beginning, the country was governed by the United Party.
And there were some people who still hoped that changes would occur in a
peaceful manner.

Later on it became clear that this was not going to happen. In the course of
campaigns that were waged, when you had the Indian passive resistance campaign,
which influenced us a great deal. We were outside it, but we observed what the
Indian people were doing--how they had organized themselves and the way they
were going to jail. So the passive resistance campaign had a big effect. The
miners strike of 1946, which was led by J.B. Marx, a communist, had a very big
impact. And then, of course, the National Party comes to power in May 1948,
presenting a challenge to everybody, to reposition themselves. Because the
National Party came in with a very strong anti-communist policy, very strong
anti-Indian policy. They wanted the Indians out of the country--back to India.

So the African movement was compelled to reckon with the realities of the South
African situation, and indicate where they stood. Could you be anti-Indian when
the white government was demanding that Indians should be expelled from South
Africa, and sent back to India? What is your position? What is the position of
the movement on communism when the National Party made everyone a communist?
Not just those who were members of the formal communist party.

I think that the May 1, 1950 strike was a particularly fierce battle between
those who felt there should be a more progressive outlook, and those who
considered that we should still stick to an exclusivist African nationalistic
position.

If you tell me about that strike and the issue of the
Indian question as it might have affected Mandela at the time.

Well, the ANC in 1949 December had adopted a program of action, [which] was
seen as a victory for the Youth League and for the African nationalist position
... Yet, shortly after that program was adopted in December 1949 ... the Defend
Free Speech convention was called by a large number of different organizations
including the communist party, the Indian Congress, the non-European Trade
Union Federation, the Transvaal ANC (that is the provincial branch of the ANC
in the Transvaal).

The purpose of the Defend Free Speech convention was to register a protest
against the bans that had been imposed on certain leaders by the Nationalist
government. They had imposed a ban on ... four leaders. That was the main
attack by the Defend Free Speech convention. But the conference then went on to
take a decision to have a strike on the 1st of May 1950. The Youth League
responded to this by saying it was an attempt to divert attention from the
program of action, to introduce a new program which was the different from the
1949 program of action. So there was a split in the ranks. Some members of the
Youth League supporting the May 1st strike, and others strongly opposed to the
May 1st strike.

Mandela was a leading figure against the decision to hold a strike on May 1st
... and attempts were made by Yusuf Cachalia to go and persuade him to support
the strike ... but ... he appeared on every conceivable platform preaching
against the strike. Well, he was under terrific attack from the communists ...
and many others who were against his point of view. Now it's a turning point
because it is that strike and that fight which eventually led to the emergence
of the Africanists ... whereas, Mandela didn't go along with the Africanists.
He eventually went with the other side, with those who felt that it had been
wrong to oppose the strike, because the strike was a mass movement against the
oppressors. And the feeling was that whenever the masses are on the march,
against oppression, then you should support the mass movement, and not be
against it. This is really how people reacted ...

...

You must have developed a closer acquaintance, as time unfolded, with
Mandela.

Yes, well I was his secretary. Remember he became president of the Youth League
in 1951 and I was the national secretary. So we obviously had to work together
...

Can you remember, around that time, any particular encounter in which you
developed a sense of the man?

Yes, well I had to have contact with him because I also had ambitions to become
a lawyer. That's how we actually first became quite personal friends, when he
was articled to Helman and Michel ... and I also was keen to go into the legal
field. There were so few of us who were trying to become lawyers, and so we had
that aspect as well, apart from the political. Then I was quite close to
Sisulu, and Sisulu was close to Mandela. I had more contact with Sisulu, in
fact, than with Mandela at the time. But gradually we got to work together.

Do you remember any particular first encounter?

Well, you must remember it's difficult for me to find anybody fascinating. I
was Z.K.'s son, you know. That was the only fascinating man in South Africa as
far as I was concerned. We were at the top of society at the time; therefore,
we didn't think any other people were so important. So I could never say one
was inspired by any of the people whom one met like Tambo and Mandela and so
on, because they had been students and I had been the son of the professor, and
we were ruling the campus as it were ...

So in the beginning one was not really aware of the merits of Mandela. I was
very conscious of the merits of Tambo, because he was our teacher, and a very
brilliant teacher ... therefore, we got to know him very well, and we regarded
him as the inspiring figure rather than Nelson Mandela. And also at the time
... Sisulu was the one who was in the news more than Mandela. You heard all the
time of Sisulu, the new secretary general elected in 1949, and he was the
leading figure rather than Mandela.

Are there any moments in that Defiance Campaign where he might have made an
elaborate show of burning his pass, for example ...

Well, we can start off a bit earlier. After the 1950 national strike, we then
had a joint planning council established by the South African Indian Congress
and the ANC to try and work out a joint program of struggle against the
policies of the Nationalist party and the Nationalist government ... when we
went to the conference in 1951 ... the person who introduced that program was
not one of the members of the council, but was Mandela.

He dressed up in his favorite brown suit. He had a favorite brown suit, which
he loved, and he introduced the joint planning council report, and, of course,
that made him the key figure at that 1951 conference, as the man who had
introduced the campaign for the defiance of unjust laws. And he was the first
person the following year to volunteer to go to prison as a person who was
going to defy unjust laws, and was in fact appointed as the national volunteer
in chief to establish this core of volunteers who were going to defy unjust
laws. So I think that that moment, December 1951, marks a very important step
in the movement of Mandela towards leadership of the ANC.

Tell me about a meeting where you formed an impression of who this guy
was.

I'll tell you where he created a very big impression, and irritated a lot of
people ... as part of the campaign it was decided to hold protest meetings on
April the 6th 1952 against the tercentenary of the arrival of whites in South
Africa. They were celebrating this arrival of Jan van Riebeeck on April the 6th
1652. We then decided to hold protest meetings at the same time. The major
meeting of protest for the ANC was in Port Elizabeth. And Dr. Maroke, the then
president general, my father, who was provincial president of the ANC, and
Mandela, who was the president of the Youth League, all gathered in Port
Elizabeth to address a huge crowd of protest against the tercentenary.

That evening there was a black tie affair ... and Mandela made a speech as
leader of the Youth League in that meeting, in which he predicted that he would
be the first president of South Africa. Now, this was quite resented because
you had the leader of the ANC there, Dr. Maroke, you had the leader of the
provincial ANC, my father, you had the man who was going act for my father, who
were all senior and then you had this upstart Mandela getting up in the dinner,
and as part of his speech, saying that he is looking forward to becoming the
first president of a free republic of South Africa. And it has happened. You
see, ja, it's happened ...

Can you recall it in a bit more detail?

Yes, well ... he read a prepared speech. It wasn't an off-the-cuff speech ...
and he wasn't wearing black tie like the other leaders. He was still in his
favorite brown suit. It was a very glittering affair, nothing proletarian about
it at all ... The main topic of his speech was the forthcoming campaign, which
was due to begin on June 26th 1952, and he was going to be in the lead in that
campaign. But it's in the course of that speech that he made this rather
startling statement. Of course, everyone thought he was just being an arrogant
young man, because nobody dreamed that we would ever reach the day of
liberation and freedom in our life time, although that was our slogan--freedom
in our life time.

But this is something I recall very vividly because a lot of us who were at
that dinner, of course, have lived to see his prediction proved correct. So it
means, he had strong ambition. That's what was reflected by that speech. The
fact that he ignored his seniors, I mean this is what many people thought it
would be more appropriate if that speech was made by the senior leaders of the
ANC, but here it was made the president of the Youth League. It was quite a
memorable moment, which I've never forgotten.

So he must have been seen as quite an irritating, arrogant, conceited
guy?

... even when he didn't hold office, this we must always remember, Mandela
always came forward and presented himself as a leading figure in the ANC. He
ignored office as the criterion of leadership and very often he did and said
things which should have been said by those who held office. Yet, he would say
it. It was perhaps a kind of supreme confidence. I don't know if one could call
it arrogance, but he was very confident, maybe over confident in himself.

He was regarded as fearless. It was known that he was fearless as a person. He
was always ready to volunteer to be the first to do something, anything that
had to be done, Mandela would volunteer to do it. Therefore, we ... never
regarded Mandela as one of the thinkers of the movement, although he wrote
articles here and there, of an ideological nature. But where we wrote articles
by the hundred, he wrote one or two, over a long period of time. So he was not
a theoretician. But he was a doer. He was a man who did things, and he was
always ready to volunteer to be the first to do any dangerous or difficult
thing, he would ready to do.

Do you remember any particular dangerous or difficult thing for which he
volunteered?

Well ... if you look even at the banning of the ANC, he was the first to say
that now we must go underground, defy the ban, and refused to disband ... He
was the first to say leaders must go underground, and prepare for armed
struggle. He was the first to advocate a violent struggle, and the abandonment
of a long held and cherished policy of nonviolence which the ANC had had since
1912. Mandela was the first to say we must break from this policy. So he was an
innovator in that sense. But always not on ideological ground but on practical
grounds that we must do this, or we must do that ...

In subsequent meetings that you had with him, after that remarkable story
that you tell about the speech in Port Elizabeth, did that stay with you that
this guy said he was going to be president of South Africa.

Well, I then went and stayed with him. During the treason trial ... after our
arrest on December the 5th, 1956, we then had a preparatory examination almost
for seven-eight months in 1957 ... I lived with him at the time. He had already
parted from his first wife, and we actually shared his room at his house in
Soweto. So I was literally ... traveling with him and listening to him and we
were having debates and arguments and so on all the time ... But we stayed
together for a long time and during that time what emerged as well, was the
change in his outlook from an African nationalist position to what you might
call almost a left wing position ...

He is very uniquely emotionally uptight, he won't confide at all ...

I think maybe what we can say is that he had very few friends in whom he could
confide. Now, one would be Walter. That's about as close as you will get to
somebody in whom he could confide. Confiding to me would be other things which
do not necessarily have a great deal of depth, like seeing a beautiful girl or
that kind of thing. But there are very few occasions on which he would confide
something outside of politics.

Politics--we had very close relations. When he decided that we should establish
a underground violent movement, he did tell me that this is what he wants to
propose, and we discussed the possible name--what would we call this
organization ... He thought we should have an indigenous name, and we
eventually got to Spear of the Nation, which is Umkhonto we Sizwe, but that was
after quite a long discussion with him. We also discussed should we really
stick to the name South Africa ... So we had discussions of that type, or
discussions about relations between us, and white communists, or with Indians
and so on ... But if it was a personal matter, then it would either be Walter
Sisulu or Tambo. Those two are the only ones with whom he would share sort of
deep secrets about his wedding or personal matters of that type.

Tell me more about Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Well, after the great strike against the establishment of a republic, he gave a
very well-known interview to the press in which he thought that the time had
come to think of new ways of struggle, and that the nonviolent struggle had
really reached its end ... That's when he started to discuss with some of his
friends, this idea of actually establishing what would eventually become a
guerrilla army. Obviously, this had to be put eventually to the national
executive of the ANC, but before that, he held discussions with Walter, with
myself, with others. One of the things he was always concerned about was to
have indigenous inspiration to any idea, and that must be reflected also in the
names ... we eventually thought that the name Umkhonto we Sizwe was the best
name, and that's what he put forward.

... The discussions on this whole issue of the armed struggle took place on a
sugar farm in KwaZulu Natal, belonging to one of the big Indian sugar barons.
Of course, the older leadership was against the idea. But ... Chief Luthuli and
others said "Okay, we won't oppose the idea. Publicly we'll say nothing. We
think that you young people have got an argument, a valid argument," and so
that's how the matter went ahead, where the official position was against ...
the majority was against the formation of turning the ANC into a guerrilla
movement. And the link between the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe came much later,
in fact in exile. But internally there wasn't agreement on the issue.

The armed struggle, would it be correct to say that the first person who
planted that idea in the movement was Mandela himself.

Yes.

When you had these first discussions ... was the nature of the violence
...

I think Mandela, from the beginning, really was looking much further ahead. The
idea was not originally accepted that we are talking of what will eventually
become a guerrilla army. It was more a question of symbolic attacks on targets
which reflected the oppressor in one way or another. Pass stations, pass
offices and places of that kind which could be symbolically blown up. But I
think he had, from the word go, and even the literature that he was reading was
based on eventual development of a guerrilla army. When he went about with
Guerrilla Warfare by Ché Guevara, it was one of the books
everybody was carrying around ... but this is what he had in mind from the
beginning. But you couldn't, I suppose, put it starkly like that in the
beginning, because so many people had been brought up on nonviolence, on civil
disobedience, on Ghandian principles and so on. We knew that, for example, the
Indian Congress would probably never go along, and they were very close allies
of ours ... The communist party, well, they had never done it in South Africa.
They had also operated very basically within the system, but at least their
ideology provided for that kind of revolutionary movement. So there was a
possibility that they would accept it ...

Did you discuss with Mandela the pros and cons of actually taking human
life?

I remember that in the beginning there was a policy against taking life. I,
myself, do not think that Mandela was against the taking of life at all,
because as I point out, he from the beginning, did envisage an army developing
out of this where others thought we were only going to employ violence but on
symbolic sort of targets. And ensure that there is no loss of life. Hence the
shock when the African Resistance Movement ... exploded something which killed
a woman. This was quite a shocking event. But Mandela was never a pacifist or
someone who was worried about loss of life.

A guy who says in 1951 he is going to be president of South Africa is a
visionary or a lunatic ... he had this image of himself ...

Ja, that's what many of us thought of him as a kind of Garibaldi. Not the
thinker, but the warrior, the brave chap who is ready to do anything which has
danger in it, without the implications and consequences being fully considered.
That is the sort of impression one had that this was a fearless man, who didn't
know what fear meant. Therefore, people tended to be wary at certain stages,
and think that now we've got to be careful of the fearless man, the brave man,
who may not have considered everything.

One also gets a sense of him prancing on stage ...

And yet .... he is not a publicist or he's not a person seeking publicity in
that sort of sense. Because he's quite a serious individual. So although there
is that in him, something of the actor, and yet there is an underlying
determination which removed the impression that this was a sort of a show off
chap. He is very serious and he, in fact, respected curiously enough although
he was not regarded as a thinker in the intellectual sense, but he was a
reflective sort of man.

I remember once when we were detained at No 4 prison in Johannesburg, after our
arrest in 1956, and I was sitting next to him and he observed Chief Luthuli
[who] was staring in the distance, thinking, obviously. And Mandela said to me,
"Do you see that man? That is the mark of a great man. A man who can think and
consider things." Now we call that in Xhosa ... a man who stares into the
horizon, thinking and so on. He obviously respected that kind of thing, and he
actually said that's the mark of a great man. That posture by Luthuli ... if
you read the accounts of him on Robben Island, you will find people remarking
on him, having those kind of moments of reflection. He does do that
deliberately to think and almost in the sense of the yoga kind of
transcendental meditation type of thing. I think he consciously does that.

Mandela grew a beard at a certain point.

Well, that's when he went underground and this is after '61. I went to see him
and was amazed that he was wearing this beard. Maybe it was part of the
preparation for being underground, and changing his appearance, and so on ... I
think it was just part of the beginnings of the underground leader mystique
...

Was this his Ché Guevara phase?

At different times in the struggle, people had different heroes. After 1949 the
hero was Mao Tse-tung and everybody was reading Chinese literature and watching
Chinese films and so on. But the hero of 1960 was, of course, Fidel Castro and
Ché Guevara ... that was the literature that was being read. Everything
we talked about was about Cuba. And the significant thing about these
guerrillas was the beard. They all sported beards. My belief is that about that
time, quite a number of people started to wear beards, and Mandela was one of
them.

Apparently, he was counseled by his colleagues to, "Shave off that bloody
beard because you are now recognizable."

No, I don't [remember], but what I do know is that we were very concerned about
his traveling. Especially the decision by him to travel throughout South
Africa, reporting on his overseas trip. That was discussed, and we were dead
against this idea. People thought that moving around Johannesburg was one
thing, but to actually leave the confines of the city, and now travel to other
provinces, was regarded as reckless. But he nevertheless decided that he was
going ... to do it ... and we were not surprised when he was arrested. It was
almost something that you had to expect, and we were very unhappy about it
...

Were people openly irritated with him after his arrest?

Ja, there was quite a good bit of irritation that this had been unwise and
reckless. But then you see, he had been so moved by his trip, he had to tell
people about his trip abroad, and his visits to Algeria, his visit to London
... which was, I suppose, a laudable aim to want to report to people, but
really the measure taken to secure his person and so on were laughable. I mean
you had this vehicle preceded by another one ... the whole thing was so
amateurish. But then everything in those days was amateurish. Not only on our
side, but on the police side. The police were very amateurish at the time
...

Mandela, the political seducer. He has shown extraordinary ability in
winning people over ... Choose one example which might serve to illustrate his
political seduction technique.

Well, I am a bit hesitant, because this has been an ANC characteristic for
years. One of the reasons for the survival of the ANC over such a long period,
is their ability to steal other people's programs, and to adapt to situations.
As extraordinary adaptation to a policy which previously they opposed, and then
they realize its merits, and then adjust and it comes out as a different
policy. That has been the characteristic of the ANC, for which they've been
criticized historically, as being inconsistent. But it's that which enabled
them to survive to a ripe old age, and they are still doing it. All one can say
is that some people in the ANC are more adept at practicing this tactic and
this policy than others.

But Oliver Tambo was the supreme persuader ... That has been the
characteristic of the African National Congress all along. Therefore, I think
it's wrong to ascribe this to Mandela alone. Remember, this is a man who has
grown up and he's steeped in the ANC way of doing things, and he knows how to
do it and when to do it ... There is that tradition of trying to see what the
other side really wants, because that's the basis of it. It is to try and
discover, out of all the rhetoric, what actually is wanted by the other side,
and you then are prepared to concede that. And win concessions in return. And
this is how they do it.

... You are saying the ANC is a sort of chameleon organization which adapts,
absorbs and steals ...

Because you see, what you are describing as the Mandela technique, is an ANC
technique. So I am trying to answer you by saying let's depersonalize this.
This is not the characteristic only of Mandela, but it's an organizational
technique, which has been used by a lot of leaders of the ANC. I gave the
example of Tambo, who in our movement is regarded as the supreme example of
this--not Mandela. Mandela has been regarded as the more heroic sort of
individual. He was never regarded as what he has become now--the diplomat, the
seducer. That was Tambo. That's the man who went to every trouble spot in the
ANC. That's the man who brought people together. That's the man who could get a
compromise out of nothing ...

So the Mandela you knew, and the present Mandela is really a different
animal.

He's different. The Mandela we see now, who comes out of the prison experience
and so on, is different from the Mandela of the '50s and '60s, who is the hero,
the heroic individual. The guy who is afraid of nothing, almost the reckless
chap. In contrast to Tambo who is the conciliator and the diplomat and the soft
spoken man and so on. You'd never send the Mandela of those days, to reconcile
people or bring people together. You would send Tambo. You can ask other
people, and say to them, "Who was the chap who used to be sent if there was a
big problem?" You send Tambo. You see. To some extent Sisulu, that's another
great conciliator and diplomat, recognized as such in the movement. But Mandela
... what has developed now into his almost primary characteristic, is something
new to many of us.